The Tragedy of U.S. Education

It is a fair rule-of-thumb, that until he thinks of himself as just another victim of the situation which the legacy of Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy," has re-imposed upon those fellow-Americans considered to be of African descent, no citizen of the U.S. is capable of seeing the reality, that his own rights as a human being are impaired by the systemic defects in our nation's present culture.

The truth of this matter, does not lie in the situation seen as the usual individual victim views it, as if with eyes in shrunken heads, from inside-out, and bottom up. Instead of the usually expressed, "TV talk-show" view of the issues, the individual must develop a scientifically efficient grasp of the centuries-long, even millennia-long historical process which has placed the victim, whoever you are, in that position.

We must view the situation of the victim, from outside himself, from the standpoint of considering his society as a whole, in which the individual exists only briefly as a mortal individual. What will be your continuing interest in the outcome of your mortal life, later? Thus, the meaning, and self-interest of that individual mortal life, could be competently conceptualized only as the principal authors of the 1776 Declaration of Independence and general welfare clause of the 1789 Preamble to the Federal Constitution situated the individual, only in two respects. Narrowly, by the individual's acting from the vantage-point of a top-down comprehension of that long-term historical process in which he is situated; but, broadly, by the individual's contribution to improving the culture within which his individual actions and their consequences are situated.

In the course of this report, I shall clarify that matter, of inside-out versus top-down, as a central matter of the scientific principle to be brought to bear; but, meanwhile, expect my proof, in a later part of this report, that the problem of racism in America today, could not be efficiently explored for durable solutions, without bringing in the issue of the top-down outlook.

As I shall show, the racism radiating from former President Nixon's 1966-68 launching of his "Southern Strategy," and permeating U.S. society, top down, today, is not a only a matter of society oppressing those considered as of African descent. It is an included symptom and product of the systemically oppressive, all-pervasive, degenerative, present condition of the society in which that specially oppressed stratum is nothing different than an integral part.

The problem immediately before us, is a matter of Nixon's abruptly reversing the trend toward civil rights, his reenergizing of a long-existing, axiomatic legacy of racist intention, as expressed in U.S. society at the moment of the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King. This is an oppression which continues to be directed not only against so-called African-Americans, but against each and all of the members of our society, whether they are conscious of this state of their affairs, or not. The effects, already actual and worse threatened, produced by the presently accelerating, new general collapse of the world's present financial system and economies, are an expression of these connections.

As I shall show in this present report, the truth of the matter at issue is exposed, most efficiently, from the standpoint of studying those defective policies which are usually practiced in the often misused name of education, the policies experienced by nearly all students, in virtually all schools and universities, still today. It is in the footprints left by the trends of change in U.S. public and higher education, and the relationship of education to citizens' voting rights, rather than such matters as employment and housing as such, that the principled issues are most immediately and clearly expressed. Patterns of employment and housing can be changed; but it is only proper education, armed with their struggle to acquire and maintain voting rights, which can enable the victims of unfair practices in employment and housing, to change their situation in the only way possible, politically.

As a first step toward that knowledge, look over my shoulder, to see that problem, so defined, as my experience has shown it to be.

My first actual knowledge of the institution of racism in the U.S.A., came, more than seventy years ago, from the dinner-table discussions at the Ohio parsonage of my maternal grandfather, the late Reverend George Weir. For me, as a child, this repeated experience was like sitting, rapt, at the performance of a great Shakespeare drama; it was living history of a recent past century, brought to life, renacting itself before me. The dominant figure on stage in those dinner-table conversations, taken as a whole, was the family's vivid anecdotal memory of my great-great grandfather, the Rev. Daniel Wood, a Quaker abolitionist in the following of John Woolman, and a contemporary of Abraham Lincoln's generation, who had resettled in the area north of Columbus, Ohio, in what is known as Woodbury. Rev. Wood had run one of the "underground railroad stations" in Ohio, and was known by handed-down family reputation as a "Henry Clay Whig" in his leanings. [2]

During my early years, first, in a Rochester, New Hampshire childhood, and, later, adolescence in the area of Boston, Massachusetts, my understanding of institutionalized racism in the U.S.A., was limited to what was supplied to me from a combination of certain Quaker traditions and my adopted, adolescent, self-identification as a follower of President Abraham Lincoln and his Clay-Carey tradition generally.

It was during my war-time experience, in military and related settings, that I had any first-hand encounter with the institutionalized contemporary practice of anti-"African-American" racism, in a more concrete, personalized way. My concerns on this matter were strengthened by experience with the disgusting racism exhibited by the British, military and others, in India and Burma, during and following World War II. However, it was memories of my conflict with the hegemonic variety of oligarchical culture of the Greater Boston area, already during my childhood and adolescence, which I mined, in my adult reflections, for the depth of background needed to understand the top-down, anglophile cultural influences, by aid of which racism and its associated effects are spread in the U.S.A. more generally.

The shortfall in most academic and other specialist attempts at comprehension of the issue of racism in America, is exhibited by most of what is written in the U.S. today on the subject of education and its required content in general, including the subject of the education of so-called "African-Americans." For example, I have on my desk a copy of James D. Anderson's The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935.[3]

The latter is, on balance, an amiable and valuable book, and a timely one for today's study, that chiefly because Anderson documents, anecdotally, and clearly, the statistical fact of a crucial difference, that expressed as intention, between education for freedom, as the figure of Frederick Douglass typifies the latter approach to U.S. chattel slavery historically,[4] and the contrary tendency of direction in education, notably that of Douglass' opponents. That of Douglass' opponents was intended to adapt most among its victims to acceptance of a more or less stereotyped future style of life, a life typified by the relatively lowest categories of employment, rather than the development of the individual as a citizen of a republic, in the fullest sense of the term.

However, the crucial problem, which, regrettably, prevented Anderson's effort from approaching the quality of "definitive," reflects his attempt to situate that important phenomenon within the wrong historical geometry, that of today's broadly accepted list of academic, so-called political-science categories, and, therefore, to ignore the essential, top-down features of the history of the relevant development of the policies and issues of education in the preceding approximately 2,600 years of European civilization. The overall result of those errors, is an example of the dangers of today's customary academic errors, of fallacy of composition in selection and treatment of the evidence considered.

I need not review Anderson's book itself here. I address the context in which I wish he had situated his approach to defining the deeper implications of the matter, and let the reader then read his book, this time in the context of the deeper issue which I set forth as follows.

1. Racism in Modern Society

Racism in the American colonies, and the U.S.A. itself, can not be competently understood, except as a product of the circumstances under which the imperial maritime power of Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries Venice, the leading European opposition to the networks and legacy of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, organized the modern African slave-trade.[5]

That slave-trade began in earnest at the outset of the Sixteenth Century, following the death of Spain's follower of Alfonso Sabio, Isabella I, through Venice's political control over the Iberian maritime powers and their monarchies. This same Venetian influence, was also exerted during that period by such figures as Henry VIII's marriage counselor, Zorzi, who were associated, like the Plantagenet Cardinal Pole and the Newt Gingrich-like, Sir Thomas More-hater Thomas Cromwell, with the circles of the Paduan mortalist Pietro Pomponazzi.[6] Later, during the Seventeenth Century hey-day of the relevant founder of empiricism, Venice's Paolo Sarpi,[7] the slave-trade became a typical practice among the customs of the Dutch and English India companies.

At the close of the Eighteenth Century, Britain began to dump the African slave-trade from vessels sailing under the "Union Jack," in favor of using the British merchant marine's bottoms for the East India Company's more lucrative opium traffic; but, Britain continued its participation in the slave-trade, deep into the Nineteenth Century, but then chiefly through its clients of the Portuguese and Spanish monarchies. In fact, the British monarchy has maintained the pro-genocidal legacy of that nation's slave-trade tradition, as Field Marshall Montgomery did, to the present day of British specialists Lynda Chalker's and Caroline Cox's currently continuing roles in shaping British and U.S. Africa policies.[8]

The characteristic feature of that modern slave-trade, is that it was premised on Venice's success in establishing a widely accepted convention as a "rule of law," a presumed rule of international positive law, that any person of sub-Saharan African descent shall be defined as fair prey, to be made into a customary, and hereditary commodity and "shareholder value" of the modern slave-trade. I refer to characteristics, distinct from the millennia-long, earlier practices of slavery, which first appeared in modern European civilization during the Sixteenth Century. This "rule of law" persists, in fact, as an active, and recently accelerated feature of the British monarchy's "Rhodes Plan" tradition of pro-genocidal policy of practice toward Zimbabwe and other regions of sub-Saharan Africa today.

The doctrine of "Life, Liberty, and Property," of English empiricist John Locke, typifies the doctrine under which the institutions of slavery and "shareholder value" have been hegemonic among what President Franklin Roosevelt recognized as our nation's treasonous "American Tory" faction, the faction represented by the combined forces of theanglophile current centered within Wall Street, and those, such as the self-styled "Nashville Agrarians,"[9] filled with nostalgic yearning for the quaintness of the Confederacy.

The mere details of the historical record on the documentation of slavery and Jim Crow, are so extensively documented, that it would be superfluous to reprint that vast record as part of the present report. Useful as that documentation is for the purpose which it serves, such mere statistical and anecdotal documentation has so far failed, inevitably, to get to the crucial point of national policy at issue.

So much putatively scholarly and other attention, has been given to the interpretation of the emotionally charged phenomena of slavery and racism in America, that the most important side of the issue, the causes for the interpreters' doubtful interpretation of that racism, has been buried.[10] My point here, is to treat those interpretations of the facts as what they are, in net effect, often inflammatory distractions of attention from the underlying, determining, principled, functional features of the solution for the continuing injustice to be cured.

Therefore, I ask you to focus your attention on the axiomatic features underlying modern history as a whole. To this end, I focus upon that aspect of the practice of slavery, which has continued to be expressed as a continuing political alliance between the "American Tory" tradition of the southern slaveholders and New York-centered Anglo-American financier interest, down to its fresh upsurge as the Nixon-led "Southern Strategy," which has dominated U.S. policy-trends increasingly since 1966-1968.

I say again, for emphasis, that the tradition of slaveholder interest, as defined by John Locke and his followers, has a vigorous reincarnation as the Locke doctrine of "shareholder interest" today. On today's global scale, that Locke doctrine, deployed under the name of "shareholder interest," has become as murderous and savage a pro-racist killer, as the old Locke doctrine of "slaveholder value" took pride in being. I shall not, and need not repeat here what is documented sufficiently elsewhere, on the relevant subject of the legacies of Jeremy Bentham's Aaron Burr and Burr's Martin van Buren, as by Anton Chaitkin's Treason in America.[11]

The Central Issue of Law

The precondition for any competent discussion of the practice and legacy of chattel slavery, and of the education of populations of former slaves and their descendants, must begin by locating the central principle of intention of law at issue in all these cases.

That issue of law is, that, prior to the revolutionary introduction of the principle of a modern sovereign form of nation-state, itself based on the principle of the general welfare, all known forms of society degraded most of their subjects to the status of either wild creatures to be hunted, or, as the Roman imperial Code of the Emperor Diocletian did, and as the feudalism of Venice and its Norman and Plantagenet allies did, that of virtual human cattle. Like cannibalism, head-hunting, and Phoenician infanticide, slavery was but one of the typical expressions of the bestiality of man to man, which pervaded known or inferrable history and prehistory, prior to the great moral improvement introduced during the Fifteenth-Century birth-pangs of modern European civilization.

For recorded portions of ancient, medieval, and modern Mediterranean and European history, the prototype of ancient societies, was the continuity of the model of ancient Mesopotamia (e.g., Babylon), the Delphi cult of the Pythian Apollo, and pagan Rome. These societies were sometimes identified as expressions of an "oligarchical model," and, whether described so or not, fit that standard description. It is the continued legacy of that oligarchical model, commonly expressed in modern times as Romanticism, which is the ancient systemic root of the evil of racism, and of related phenomena, in all of modern European civilization, including the U.S.A. today.

The modern African slave-trade, as launched, under Venetian influence, near the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, was first practiced by Portugal and Spain, and later by the ruling oligarchies of the Netherlands and England, that according to the precedent of pagan Roman law (i.e., Romanticism). As noted, these modern slave-traders treated so-called "black Africans" as, originally, wild prey to be hunted, and the captives held, bred, and culled as, quite literally, human cattle.

Three features of this Venetian innovation in the practices of slavery, as by the Portuguese and Spanish monarchies, are most notable.

First, that the introduction of the trans-Atlantic slave-trade into the Americas by the Sixteenth-Century Portuguese and Spanish monarchies, and under the Seventeenth-Century Dutch and English monarchies, was aimed, from the beginning, to prevent the successful development, in either the Americas or Europe, of the new form of independent nation-states modelled on the reforms of France's Louis XI and England's Henry VII.

The included aim was to plant and develop in the Americas a powerful oligarchical class, of the compradore type, as typified by the English-speaking North American slaveholders and their confederates, which would both loot the Americas for the profit of their European backers, and also serve to suppress the tendency toward emergence, in those Americas, of independent nation-state republics, the latter according to the Fifteenth-Century nation-state principle, the constitutional principle of the general welfare.[12]

The second feature, was the change in the way in which the virtually global marketing of African slaves and their produced product was practiced, relative to earlier periods in European history. The genocidal scale of loss of life among the victims, in their capture, culling, and transportation to the Americas, reflected the commercial programs used by Venice and its Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and English and French partners (chiefly). The appetite for the profit of such forms of looting, and the demands of those financier interests who funded these operations, resulted in a vast expansion of the scale of slavery; and the ratio of deaths caused, both directly and indirectly, by the combined capture and transport of slaves taken in Africa, zoomed to monstrous proportions.

The flooding of European markets with goods looted from the Americas and its growing slave populations, was, as has been generally recognized, a new, global, commercial scale and quality introduced to the practice of slavery.

This is a point addressed by the leading American economist, Henry C. Carey, in his work on the slave-trade and the practice of slavery in the United States. Essentially, Carey's facts show that the pre-1861 U.S. economy as a whole did not profit from slavery, but, rather, lost money on slavery. The net economic benefit of that slavery was enjoyed, not by the internal economy of the U.S.A., but by the British monarchy, looting the U.S. physical economy, its people, and its natural resources, for the enrichment of the parasitical British system.[13] The slave-owning U.S. planter class, was simply a local pack of predatory parasites, compradores acting as the de facto agents of the British monarchy in this business arrangement.

The third feature, was the use of the power of the initially Habsburg-centered European assets of Venice, to attempt to crush the accomplishments of the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance out of existence in Europe itself.

Their intent was to destroy and outlaw that institution of the sovereign nation-state based on the principle of the general welfare, such as Louis XI's France and Henry VII's England, which had been introduced by the Fifteenth-Century European Renaissance. The roles of the Habsburgs, as tools of Venice, in both the fostering of the trans-Atlantic slave-trade and the religious warfare of the 1511-1648 interval, were continued through the participation of the Nineteenth-Century Habsburg and Spanish monarchies in support of the cause of the slaveholders in North America against the United States, through the point of that assassination of Lincoln, conducted with political support from Habsburg circles in Rome and elsewhere, through the 1863-1865 interval. The British monarchy, although a rival of the Habsburg-centered pro-feudalist interests of continental Europe, played the same role in its own interest, often in concert with its imperial rival, the Habsburg interest.[14]

Thus, the three pro-slavery factors so indicated, are fully congruent with the adopted legacy of the so-called "conservative revolution" of the modern fascist tradition traced from Romantics such as Friedrich Nietzsche and like-minded existentialists, through Mussolini, Hitler, and the neo-Confederacy tradition of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and the Nixon "Southern Strategy" campaign of 1966-1968.[15] As I have documented that point in an earlier published location, the Confederacy qualifies as a fascist state in the strictest sense, that of the 1789-1794 Jacobin Terror, the tyrannies of Napoleon Bonaparte and Napoleon III, and Twentieth-Century cases such as Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, and their co-thinkers of the 1920-1945 interval. The "Southern Strategy" is, as Newt Gingrich described his "Contract With America" movement, in 1995, a strictly fascist movement, a "conservative revolution," as Armin Mohler defined it as an historical phenomenon, in the footsteps of Robespierre, the imperial Bonapartes, Mussolini, and Hitler.[16]

That defines, summarily, the context, within which the history of the modern slave-trade and its aftermath must be situated, for any competent understanding of the roots of racism in America today. It is only against that historical background, that the issues of law and related policy may be competently addressed.

The fundamental issue of law posed by the legacy of that modern slave-trade, is nothing different than the following. Is there some absolute difference, corresponding to a physical-scientific notion of a universal physical principle, between the nature of the individual human being and the nature of each and all lower forms of animal life? It is from the standpoint of this question, and in no other way, that the issues of slavery and of education policy in general, are competently posed. As experience to date should have shown anyone alert to the facts, any different standpoint has turned out to be a dead end, and an awful waste of time, sweat, and much blood.

The fundamental issue, as I have just identified it, is best brought into focus by concentration on the way that issue is expressed in terms of policies for universal education.

The basis in law and custom for the institution of both the modern slave-trade and its continuing offshoots, is what I have already referenced here as that legacy of pagan Roman law and custom which is strictly definable as Romanticism. Empiricism, as associated with the legacy of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Adam Smith, is the most widespread and important expression of Romanticism in the past and present history of the United States, and has provided the geographical basis, in choice of climate, for the legalization of the custom of slavery and the slave-trade within some among the original thirteen English colonies of North America, most notably the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia.[17]

Since prior to Plato, the fundamental issue of law within globally extended European civilization, has continued to be the conflict between two axiomatically irreconcilable notions of law and government, between the Classical standpoint of natural law, as typified by Plato and the Christianity of the New Testament,[18] and that opposing, pagan tradition known today as the Romantic school of law, whose precedents included the customs of ancient Babylon and the Delphi cult of the Pythian Apollo.

It is only from that standpoint respecting law, that the phenomena of racism in modern society can be competently diagnosed.

The effect of the influence of various forms of Romanticism, in crippling the mental and emotional life of Americans, for example, generally today, is pervasive, and is expressed in varieties of ways. Empiricism, as typified by the teachings of Locke, as aggravated in the form of imported positivism and its offshoot, the pragmatism of William James and John Dewey, or the behaviorism of Watson, et al., is to be recognized as the corrupting, hegemonic current in present-day education, law, and scholarly practices, in the U.S. It is also, specifically, the prevalent basis in intellectual corruption for what has been taught as "political science" and "sociology," during the past century. My concern here is to show, how all of that is combined with a specific degree and form of force, in the phenomenon rightly distinguished as racism.

In the history of European civilization, this issue is best typified by the irreconcilable opposition, both in principle and in fact of practice, between, as I have said above, that Classical Greek tradition typified by the dialogues of Plato and by Christian humanism, on the one side, and what is called Romanticism, on the other. The key to understanding all of the leading features of approximately 2,500 years of European civilization to date, is the conflict between the Classical Greek tradition of Solon, Plato, et al., on the one side, and the oligarchical model of ancient Babylon and the Delphi cult of the Pythian Apollo, and also, the legacy of pagan Rome.

That conflict between Classicism and Romanticism, is key to any competent understanding of the roots and effects of the modern slave-trade and its legacy as racism in the U.S. today. This locates the point of reference from which to understand educational policies of practice as the political battlefield on which the most essential fight against racism must be conducted.

Those who enjoy the right to a Classical humanist form of education, or its functional equivalent in self-education, are implicitly free; those who lack that education, are assuredly inviting, if not already suffering the conditions imposed upon virtual human cattle, even the conditions of slavery.

Plato's Meno Dialogue

In addressing the issue of slavery and its legacy in the U.S. today, the typification of this difference, as expressed in education, is Plato's Meno dialogue, as the lives of Classicist Frederick Douglass and of his family typify that distinction with a special practical excellence. Whereas, as I shall emphasize here, those who tolerate such swinishness as the policy of not compelling students to expose themselves to the ideas of "dead, white European males" (DWHEMs) are, in fact, acting to defend and propagate the mentality of men and women who embrace the most essential features of slavery. The act of the fool who rejects study of the ideas of DWHEMs, must therefore reject the lesson of Plato's Meno, and thus defines himself as the fool whose part he is playing. The life of Frederick Douglass expresses the same connection emphasized by Plato.

The essence of the issue posed by racism, is to be located only in respect to that conflict between those two views on education. Either one takes the side of Frederick Douglass in that debate, or one is, in fact, dedicated to promoting what is recognized as the practice of racism, whether one believes that he, or she intends that result, or not.

The so-called African-American, for example, who defends the notion of an education free of the requirement of mastering the ideas of "dead white European males," is being a racist to himself; he is the slave who does not need to be enslaved, because he zealously puts his shackles on himself, and displays them proudly, even militantly. He is like that slave who insists, "Don't give me freedom; just give me reparations--money."

As Plato illustrates the proof of this, in his Meno, all human individuals have the developable cognitive potential to generate validated discoveries of universal physical principle. From that vantage-point, all human beings are equal in respect to their inborn nature, and all groups of human beings, from every society, share, as a group, that developable potential in virtually equal degree. The essential function of education, and of the conditions of family and community life in which education occurs, is to develop precisely that cognitive potential to the highest possible degree, in every possible young individual.

No lower form of life has this potential; that is the essential difference between man and beast. Beasts can learn, but only human beings can know; education which teaches children to learn to pass tests, to acquire habits needed for a specific form of employment, is education designed for beasts. Such forms of education, or of family relations, will tend to bestialize the students, and produce corresponding rations of bestialized adults. Unless your children are enjoying a Classical humanist form of education, they are being cheated; they are being bestialized, at least relatively so, that in the name of education.

It is important to emphasize, once more, that the result of accepting mere learning as a substitute for knowing, is not far from the condition of being a slave. At the very best, mere learning is a kind of obedience-training, as at a school for dogs, which produces an individual prone to many of the characteristics of behavior of a slave, the characteristics of a class of virtual human cattle.

Those who enjoy a Classical quality of education, and who are permitted to express that development in their practice as functioning members of society, are relatively "free," at least within and among themselves; those who lack such educational development, are not yet free within themselves.[19] Those who are not free within themselves, will find themselves, if not actually slaves, self-degraded to a condition fairly described as "human cattle," as today's U.S. popular opinion and mass entertainment, condition most Americans today to behave as did the Roman mob of spectators in the Colosseum, as human cattle, most of the time.

Now, turn again to Plato's Meno dialogue. Do not merely read it; relive it. Relive it as if you were, alternately, playing the part of the boy, and of Socrates: not acting out the recitation of the words, but reliving that experience of the paradox and discovery for which those words are, like sense-perceptions, mere shadows cast on the irregular wall of a dimly lit cave.

2. Education & Humanity

All of my own original discoveries of principle, during the approximately sixty years of my adult life, have been the harvest from a single germ, a germ whose existence I can date consciously, as a matter of knowledge, to no later than my childhood's family and community life, during my first three years of public school, in Rochester, New Hampshire. Some of the resulting, original discoveries, which first occurred early during my adult years, are shown to have been of outstanding, world-wide importance today, most emphatically so by the implications of the eruption of the presently ongoing, global, combined, existential financial, monetary, and economic crisis.[20]

As I have repeated that observation many times, it was during those childhood years in Rochester, that I recall today, reaching the conclusion that my parents, and most of the adults and peers I knew, lied habitually most of the time, as most of your friends and neighbors, and elected officials, still today.[21] It was also clear to me, that teachers, even then, were not necessarily a source of truthfulness. In my parental household, lying was filed, euphemistically, under such categories as "company manners," or falsehoods which, when caught out, were explained to the children as "I am only telling you this, for your own good." In school, the same type of practice prevailed, and tended, in my experience, to grow worse, not better, as the grade-levels succeeded one another.

In political life generally, lying is often called today, "Going along to get along." Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends and Influence People, is an example of a ritual devotion to lying, as seen through the eyes of my own generation.[22] "Sensitivity," is the code-word for widespread practices of lying popular among the so-called "Baby Boomer" generation. Those horrid, existentialist fanatics, who insist upon threatening school pupils with the Orwellian dogma, that there is no truth, only opinion, are perhaps the worst of the liars to be considered for the purposes of this report.

I recognized that what I was instructed to learn, was morally worthless to me, even if it might happen to be true factually, unless I knew it to be true by my own intellectual resources. I became, therefore, with but extremely rare exceptions, typically, the most knowledgeable person in any class I attended, among those most stubbornly resistant to merely learning what was prescribed. Some learned much more than I knew, but what I knew, I, unlike those peers, actually knew. I developed, more and more, the habit, that to say what one had merely learned to say, as to assert, as a matter of claims to knowledge, "What I read," or, "What I have been taught to believe," or "What I have been told by authorities I respect," is, itself, intrinsically, a form of lying, a form of habitual lying typical of the society and peer groups I knew.

Take, as an example, my rejection of the first year of high school geometry, from about the first day of class.

Earlier, I had observed carefully the structures seen during one among my not-infrequent family visits to the Charlestown (Boston), Massachusetts Navy Yard, and recognized that the holes made in the steel beams made the structures stronger, by eliminating the burden of weight not essential to the function of supporting the structure itself. Why should people concerned with the strength of the structures they had constructed, make those holes in the relevant beams? I decided that knowing the kind of geometry required for this use of materials, represented some principle to be discovered and mastered.

So, when the teacher challenged the members of the assembled geometry class to identify the useful purpose for studying geometry, I referred to the effect of making those holes in the beams seen at the Navy Yard: one cuts out the holes to make the structure stronger; there must be some reason why circular, or approximately circular holes had been chosen for those cases. Those who ridiculed my response, which included some teachers at that high school, and most of the classmates, were not only clearly wrong on this and other issues expressing the same matter of method. This intellectual, and moral flaw expressed by my critics in that matter, is but all too typical of much of the adult population, even university science graduates with what are called, sometimes ironically, "terminal degrees," of the present day, and pathetically so.

In all my own teaching of university students, and in my leading role in the philosophical association which I have led, since more than three decades ago, I have recognized, and emphasized the importance of the individual's developing an epistemologically competent, critical insight into the characteristic panoply of ideology of his or her own culture, and of comparing the pathological quality inhering in that and all other ideologies of all cultures. Without that kind of self-conscious awareness of the invariably, ideologically polluted character of the prevalent assortment of leading ideologies within one's own cultural background, one is like a blinded beast struggling to survive in a swamp whose quicksands and other perils one is conditioned not to recognize.

Look at my immediate, and continuing disgust, in reaction to that classroom situation, from the standpoint of my frequent use, over recent decades of teaching and related activities, of the example of Johannes Kepler's original discovery of the principle of universal gravitation. The issue, that geometry must be studied from the standpoint of physics, rather than Euclidean ivory-tower geometry, was the same, in my relatively primitive, but accurate, adolescent's recognition of a pervasive, axiomatic fallacy in the classroom teaching of geometry and mathematics, and in Kepler's much more profound grasp of the same distinction, he echoing thus the insights of such among his named, relatively immediate predecessors as Nicholas of Cusa and Leonardo da Vinci.

Riemann's fundamental contribution to all modern physical science, was to free geometry from all such ivory-tower assumptions, and to base mathematics exclusively upon experimentally validated discoveries of universal physical principles. In my own principal original discoveries, I established the basis which enabled me, shortly thereafter, to view Riemann's work in the more general way required for a competent science of physical economy. It is mankind's relationship to the universe, as measured by increases in society's increased power to exist, per capita and per square kilometer of surface area of Earth, which is the foundation for all that truly sane people will regard as empirical knowledge, nominally physical-scientific or other.

That is the continuing tradition of Plato, Cusa, Kepler, Leibniz, et al., within which lie all of my principled contributions to society. So, the germ of all that began for me, in my rebellion against the kind of knee-jerk-reflex lying I witnessed, as a child, among my parents' household and their society. Herein lies also the germ of what must become our nation's general policy, respecting education for freedom.

As Kepler emphasized this fact, the astronomers Claudius Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe, had each made the same specific mistake against which I rebelled in the secondary geometry class, as I rebelled, later in my student years, against swallowing a version of a differential calculus premised fatally upon the fraudulent, radically reductionist Cauchy "fraction," and as I, still later, in early 1948, rejected the fraud of Norbert Wiener's "information theory:" in each case, on the same epistemological premises.

There is no exaggeration, or other incongruity, in my comparison of my adolescent reaction against the underlying error of secondary geometry instruction, to the reaction of Kepler to the fundamental errors of method by Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Brahe. What I expressed in that act of rebellion, was like Kepler's recognizing the fallacies of Ptolemy et al., a defense of that same principle which is innate to all human beings, and which expresses the fundamental distinction between man and the apes. This, as I shall emphasize, is, as Frederick Douglass's life reflects this, a distinction inhering in every child of those liberated from slavery, or of newborn children of today. This was expressed for me, as an adolescent, and also earlier, by a feeling of moral wrongness in the demand that one suppress in oneself the impulse to know, a demand that I do so for sake of the rewards proffered for obedience to the demand that one submit to learn as one is told.

More and more, especially as they grew older, most among those who had been my youthful peers capitulated, sooner or later, to the pressures for doing as one is told one must learn to do, especially as they acquired more and more of the burden of what are sometimes described as household life's hostages to fortune. The difference was, essentially, that I, like others of my kind, did not capitulate; being human was too important for us, to betray our birthright.

I shall return to that point as the pivotal feature of the argument developed in this report.

These three, Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Brahe, had constructed their astronomy on the basis of completely arbitrary, wrong-headed blind faith in the assumption, that events in space and time were organized according to a so-called Euclidean, infinitely linear, unscientific,[23] ivory-tower notion of space and time. Kepler, showing that any such construction as theirs, could not account for the variations in position and speed of the planet in its orbit, discovered an underlying, universal physical principle, universal gravitation, a discovery through which we are able, today, to know much about why the orbit behaves as it does.[24]

By "know," I mean, first of all, discovering paradoxical evidence, the kind of evidence which shows that reality contradicts absolutely what ivory-tower assumptions, such as those of Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Brahe, assume, still today, to be universally true. I mean also, solving the paradox posed by that contradiction; I mean, discovering, or rediscovering, through the perfectly sovereign cognitive powers of one's own individual mind, a Socratic form of hypothesis, which can be shown, physically, to be universally true, and is, therefore, an experimentally validated, universal physical principle. What you know in that way, and only in that way, is as much as you actually know about anything.[25]

This quality of knowing, as distinct from the beast-like ability to learn, is, once again, the essential, absolute distinction which sets the human species apart from all lower forms of life. In theological terms, this is the specific quality of the human individual, which is reflected in Genesis 1: man and woman as made equally in the image of the Creator of the universe, and, thus commanded to assume dominion within that universe, that in accord with the human individual's kinship to the nature of the Creator. This is no mere hand-me-down tradition; it is a scientific fact, as readily demonstrated as if that chapter of Genesis had never been written; sometimes, as the Apostle Luke writes, we must "let the stones cry out!"

Unless our natural human potential has been crippled by habituation to mere learning, when we, as such human beings, are faced with a paradox, in which something we had been taught to accept as universally true, such as a Euclidean geometry, is demonstrably false to physical reality, we reject the presumed authority of that mere learning. If we are then honest with ourselves, we cease to look for answers in "the back of the textbook," and cease attempting to pass the course by reciting what we have been taught to say.

Unless we are crippled by conditioning to accept conditioned learning, if we have not, like the Biblical Esau, sold our birthright for the mess of pottage called learning, we cease playing the game according to what we were told were "the accepted rules." We must strike out on our own, and discover a truthful solution.

However, this is no license for existentialism, or of kindred, inherently destructive, and evil forms of intellectual anarchy. In such matters, we must always act on behalf of discoverable truth, according to principles lacking in all beasts. We must act according to that specifically anti-reductionist quality of mind, which is indicated by a literate use of the term reason, reason, sometimes called natural law, as pointing toward some imperfectly known, but coherent set of principles underlying the ordering of the universe.

How shall we know that the crucial solution for a rigorously defined paradox, called a Socratic hypothesis, which we believe we have uncovered, is truthful? Plato's Meno dialogue confronts the reader with precisely such a problem, and that in the form a slave boy might be capable of not only solving the problem, but know that he had solved it. There, in that example from Plato's work, lies the open door to a real education, a Classical mode of primary, secondary, and higher education.

I had the good fortune to meet a few teachers, in the course of my childhood and adolescence, who sometimes walked me through vivid experiences of discovery of the relatively simplest quality of universal physical principles, those of the type which the Meno and Theaetetus dialogues typify. In later life, Professor Robert Moon was notable among those whose impact upon me was of that quality.[26] With a bit of such help, here and there, what did most of the rest for me, were a similar approach to study of books and my own critical, experimental view of what became an increasingly rich experience of, and appetite for the world at large

Once one has that kind of Socratic experience, as a child, perhaps one never really forgets it. In the first moments one is aware that one has confronted an actual paradox, produced the fruitful hypothesis, and proven the hypothesis by appropriate experimental standards, one must never forget that mental-emotional experience. It is something of a different quality than one experiences in any other way. That way of looking at the world, in terms of that special kind of cognitive experience, must become the core of our sense of "Who I am!"

In search of that truth of reason, about the age of twelve, I found myself lured into stumbling, as if purblind, but not accidentally, into a habit of reading philosophy, and, increasingly, debating, within my mind, with the authors of those writings.

During the ages of twelve through eighteen, I worked my way through the standard books authored by each of those certified to me as the leading English and French philosophers of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries. At the same time, I became more and more engaged by the writings of Gottfried Leibniz, and faced the challenge of Immanuel Kant's attack on Leibniz. About my fourteenth year, I had become a convert to Leibniz's approach, with special attention to the Theodicée and Monadology, and by sixteen had begun filling notebooks with composed arguments in defense of Leibniz against Immanuel Kant of the Kemp-Smith presentation of the first and second editions of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

The issue was the same which arose, during that same adolescence, as my quarrel with the ivory-tower version of Euclidean geometry, at the beginning of the high school geometry course. What are ideas, and what is the provable relationship between ideas and the physical reality of the universe upon which we are acting willfully?

In fact, I knew virtually nothing, first hand, of Plato's work at that time, or for some time later, but I had become, through my objections to the empiricists (among whom I included Kant), an implicit Platonist, through the mediation of English translations of Leibniz, and through wrestling, as if in living controversy on the stage of my imagination, against the principal philosophers of the so-called English and French Enlightenment.

The point to emphasize is that with which I began the present section of this report: How does one find one's way, in a world in which parents, teachers, peers, and public officials, lie about almost anything, most of the time? For an "ugly duckling" like me, that was the most important, the most impassioned, of all questions. It is the crucial issue, for any student, of securing an education for the cause of freedom.

It is necessary that I continue a bit longer here in this direction, but I shall interrupt the part of the development of my argument for a moment, now, to make some needed remarks on the direction in which this report is now leading us.

Classical Education

What I have just illustrated by these autobiographical references, illustrates, both technically and morally, what is meant by a Classical humanist mode of education, as Classical humanist education differs from those sundry Romantic varieties and their offshoots, which predominate in the schools, universities, and popular culture of the Americas and Europe today. I emphasize Classical humanist education, against the satanic influences exerted in U.S. and other educational policy today, by truth-hating existentialists such as the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger and his morally degenerate cronies Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt.[27]

The illustration I have given from my personal experience, just above, is typical of the importance of choosing the Classical humanist approach to classroom education, and also, toward the conduct of that greater portion of any successful Classical education, which must, of necessity, occur in the private, personal activity of the student, apart from the classroom.

The Classical education program, as conducted in the classroom itself, could provide no more than a good partial map of extant knowledge; the broader significance of the in-classroom program, is that it provokes the student to explore, on his own, the larger physical reality which the map attempts to represent, a map which is merely an approximation. A good Classical education, if constantly reenforced by an active, cognitive form of experimentally oriented self-education of that quality, develops in one the ability to make clear distinctions, as I did in my reaction against ivory-tower geometry, between a mere map and the physical reality which it, at its best, merely symbolizes.

The dialogues of Plato, the scientific writings of Archimedes and of his contemporary Eratosthenes, and the founding of modern experimental physical science by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, with his De Docta Ignorantia and relevant later writings in this field, the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, and the writings of Johannes Kepler, especially his New Astronomy, are, if combined as one experience, paradigmatic for any serious student today. All great scientists, and all truly promising students, as children and adolescents, are those training themselves, primarily, in the role of becoming ever better performers as original thinkers, discoverers of experimentally validatable universal physical principles, first, and pedagogues only as a subsumed part of the work of ongoing attack upon, and sharing of ever new discoveries.

As I walked readers through the successive steps of the process of such discovery, in sundry earlier publications, there are three crucial implications of making, or communicating a series of validatable original discoveries of universal physical principles.

First, what is the process by which a discovery of an experimentally validatable universal physical principle is made, and communicated, as such communication should occur between teacher and pupil in a competent form of education? I summarize here, what I have presented many times in earlier locations on the definition of ideas.

Second, what is different about such discoveries of principle, on the one side, and the objects we believe that we have experienced directly through the means of our sense-perceptions, on the other?

Third, when we take into account the ability to generate and communicate the experience of valid discoveries of universal physical principle among the members of society, what is the fundamental difference, on principle, between relations among animals, and among human beings? What happens to the notion of "race," once that difference is taken into account?

It is upon those three considerations that the notion of a Classical humanist mode of primary, secondary, and higher education is premised. It is in such a mode of education, that the otherwise infectious bestiality of notions of "race" is avoided.

Lately, we have been presented with paleontological relics, which anthropologist Meave Leakey claims to represent human life in Africa from several millions of years ago. I would not insist that she is mistaken in saying that those relics are representative of the human species, but the ideology of the school of anthropology with which she is associated, does not permit us to trust her on the matter of defining the nature of the strict difference between human beings and what are classed as "the higher apes."

Her argument, as I witnessed it on a televised interview broadcast by Britain's Sky News, is highly provocative, because of some among its more plausible features; but, the argument I heard from her is not definitive.[28] Perhaps there are physiological characteristics of man as a cognitive species, which should indicate to us, as Leakey claims, even in the case of fossils, whether or not the fossil is human. We know that that kind of distinction has not yet been determined scientifically, since the crucial question defining the relevant experiment has not yet been recognized among the relevant peer-review establishments. Meanwhile, what we can classify as human fossils, are cases in which the site in question is conclusively associated with products of distinctively cognitive activity, of which, despite Wolfgang Köhler's use of the term "insight," higher apes are not capable.[29]

As a wag might put the point: "Teacher! Don't you monkey around with my children!"

This distinction goes to the heart of my original discoveries in the science of physical economy. What I personally, have to add to the extensive literature on the otherwise known principles of Classical humanism, is the effect of my discoveries in enabling us, today, to resolve certain previously unresolved issues of that topic. It is those resolutions which have made possible the fresh argument on education for freedom which I present here.

Now, focus on the three points I have listed a short space above. I turn now to the first of those topics, the subject of the act of discovering and communicating a valid discovery of universal physical principle.

Discovery & Its Communication

As I have elaborated this definition in locations published earlier, there are three distinct steps in any valid discovery of a universal physical principle. As I have summarized the point in those locations, the most appropriate presentation of that process of discovery references the practical significance of what Leibniz termed Analysis Situs, a notion which Riemann addressed explicitly, or otherwise, in all of his leading work. The most rigorous form of recognition of the need to effect a new discovery of universal physical principle, is the following.

Given an assumed set of definitions, axioms, and postulates, which have been assumed to best represent, mathematically, the consistent understructure of our prior knowledge of the physical universe. In the case, that an experimental, or equivalent experience, described strictly in those mathematical terms, produces a certain type of clash of represented results, we must regard that conflict as of the form of what we call an ontological paradox. Take as an example of this, Fermat's introduction of the notion of a contradiction between the notion that action occurs along a pathway of shortest distance, and the physical evidence, that refraction of light occurs along a different pathway, that of quickest time.

This discovery, as pursued further by Huyghens, Leibniz, Bernouilli, et al., required the overturn of that Aristotelean-Euclidean notion of mathematical physics which subsumes the neo-Ockhamite variety developed as English empiricism by Paolo Sarpi, Sarpi's house-servant Galileo, et al. That discovery did not provide the accomplishment of that task; it posed the need to develop a solution for that paradox. The combined effects of Kepler's and Fermat's discoveries, thus foredoomed the conventional classroom doctrine of geometry used in the usual mathematics and physics classrooms. The search for a solution for these paradoxes, led, as through the definitions of an anti-Euclidean geometry by Leibniz follower Abraham Kästner, through the work of Monge, Gauss, et al., to the discovery and development of modern hypergeometry, successively, by Gauss and Riemann.

To restate and emphasize that point in broader terms of reference: As I have indicated, in earlier locations, during the middle of the Seventeenth Century, this paradoxical experimental discovery by Fermat, juxtaposed against the paradoxes posed by the revolutionary discoveries by Kepler, set into motion all of the subsequent principal progress in physical science and mathematics, through the circles of Christiaan Huyghens and Leibniz, through the work of Riemann and beyond. Leibniz's originality in discovering the calculus, and his continuation of that discovery as his monadology, contrary to the later frauds by Leonhard Euler, Augustin Cauchy, et al., is a central feature of that process of development. This would be a pivotal feature of any competent secondary program of education in mathematics and physics.

In any truthful, Classical secondary educational program, the student should relive Kepler's, Fermat's, Huyghens', Leibniz's, and Bernouilli's related work, as a mandatory exercise, prerequisite to certification as a secondary-school graduate.

The kind of mutually contradictory, pairwise statements, such as those of Fermat's experimental comparison of reflection and refraction of light, provide an example of the way in which a pre-existing ivory-tower form of mathematical physics often collapses when one attempts to extend it to previously unknown, or overlooked physical realities. The juxtaposing of a pair, or more, of such mutually contradictory statements, as formulated within some existing mathematical-physics doctrine, typifies an ontological paradox, as Plato, for example, addressed such phenomena. The juxtaposition of the contradictory elements of such an ontological paradox, typifies a statement in the form of Analysis Situs.

For example, in the history of arithmetic as such, there are ontological paradoxes among the notions of arithmetic, algebraic, and transcendental numbers. Plato addresses the first pair in his dialogues, and implies still higher cases, as in his Timaeus. These paradoxes and their implications, are addressed in one way by Kästner and his student Carl Gauss,[30] leading Gauss and his successors Lejeune Dirichlet and Riemann, to develop a new kind of mathematics and physics.[31] In physical science as such, we discover two pertinent things about this. First, that all meaningful paradoxes introduced by higher categories of number, are phenomena which reflect some, underlying, corresponding function within physical science; and, second, that the existence of number itself originates in, and is controlled by the way in which the universe is organized according to physical principles, rather than the simply aprioristic notions of numerical ones, as the latter are typified by the assumptions of Bertrand Russell and such acolytes of his numerological cult as Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann.[32]

The first step in a well-organized process of discovery of some valid universal physical principle, is to define such an experimental quality of ontological paradox, by showing that the paradox must reflect a systemic flaw within (for example) the existing doctrines of mathematical physics as a whole. Such a paradox is stated most usefully in the form of a paradoxical statement in the form of Analysis Situs.

At that point in the investigation, the second step takes over. The ivory-tower pedant's classroom blackboard is banned from the continued proceedings, until an hypothetical solution is found. The solution to such a paradox will be found only in the domain of what is defined by Plato as hypothesis. This hypothesis must be in the form of a revolutionary change in the kind of mathematical physics used to state the paradox. This hypothesis has, and must have, the form and other quality demanded by the notion of a universal physical principle. Such an hypothesis is purely a creation of the sovereign cognitive powers of the individual mind of the thinker who generates that hypothesis. This is the most crucial fact about all valid methods of education, especially education for freedom.

The third step, once an hypothesis has been generated as a credible kind of proposed possible solution for the paradox, is to craft a design of experiment, which will test for two results. The first such result, must be to demonstrate that a real basis for the assumed effects of the hypothesis can be proven. The second result, must be to show that the hypothesis succeeds not only in some cases, but must be of the quality of unique experiment whose results can be regarded as a universal principle of any future mathematical physics.

If those conditions are satisfied, the solution to the paradox is apparently valid. The immediate next question posed is, therefore, how could the act of discovering and validating the relevant hypothesis itself be caused to occur in the mind of other persons? Now, we have touched the most essential question of all education. On the answer for this question, the very meaning of education itself depends entirely. We have thus, now, reached the pivotal issue of our study of the subject of education as such.

Given two students within a class, who are given a statement of facts corresponding to an ontological paradox as I have described it above. Let each student withdraw from discussion with the teacher and other pupils for a time. Let each student attempt to solve the riddle, and put any proposed solution into the form of a plausibly arguable hypothesis.

That phase completed, let the class reassemble. Let each of the students who thinks he or she has discovered a solution for the riddle, now observe the teacher's demonstration of each among the students' proposed solutions. Assume that two among the students have solved the riddle, and that, therefore, the experimental demonstration shows that, at least, their proposed solutions are experimentally plausible. Now, the question becomes, which, if any, of those experimentally plausible solutions meet the standard of a universal physical principle?

Let us redefine that situation, as follows. In this report so far, I have made reference to various celebrated discoverers and some part of their original discoveries. Now, instead of merely presenting the class with a riddle, let us make the subject of the riddle historically concrete, referencing one or more of those, or other discoverers. Let us take Archimedes' cry of "Eureka!" as the point of reference. What was Archimedes yelling about?

We have a place. We have a date, or at least an approximate one. We have a name. We have relevant facts concerning his background, and his previous work. We have portraits which are putatively representations of Archimedes himself. We have a topographical and political map of the area of modern Italy and of the relevant portions of the Mediterranean, at the time the Sicilian Archimedes was about to be butchered by the invading Roman soldiers. We have also a general picture of the quality of Archimedes' accomplishments and of his relationship to the Eratosthenes, the world's greatest astronomer of that period, then living and working in Egypt, the latter a man of Cyrenaic origin, educated at Athens as a member of the Academy founded by Plato. Give the students the riddle of specific weight which Archimedes solved, by situating him as a real-life person in real history, in their minds, thus efficiently personalizing the task of replicating Archimedes' solution for the riddle. Don't give away the solution for the riddle, but, short of that, box the solution in, factually and historically, as much as possible otherwise.

This is the approach employed in a Classical humanist education.

Let us imagine the case in which two bright pupils, who have obviously been through similar experiences earlier, produce a plausible solution for the riddle. Then, after the demonstration experiment before the entire class, we have the following social situation.

The two relevant students from that class, have experienced a discovery of an hypothesis which is at least an approximation of Archimedes' success. Now, review the dramatis personae of the drama within the classroom as the demonstration is completed.

The teacher knows. Two of the students have each more or less replicated what happened within the sovereign cognitive processes of Archimedes; now that the demonstration experiment has been conducted, they are elated by the fact that they now really "see" the solution. The cry of "Eureka!" is now in order. Other pupils who have not solved the riddle, see a connection between the riddle and the demonstrated result of the discovery, and also see that fellow-students have been able to re-create a living moment from the mind of the great Archimedes within their own minds!

Meanwhile, inside the mind of each of the two students who produced fairly approximate hypothetical solutions for the riddle, there is a recognition of something of fundamental importance, something uniquely human.

There were three distinct, successive actions in the model case outlined. First, the paradox, then the hypothesis, and, finally, the validated discovery of principle which solves the paradox. It is the second of those three actions which is crucial: the act of hypothesizing a plausible, or entirely valid solution. Here lies the essential principle of all competent educational policy: the principle of cognitive hypothesizing of validatable discoveries of universal principle. Focus on the two successful students, and their state of mind in the aftermath of the demonstration and its discussion.

Focus on the fact that the relevant act of hypothesizing has occurred, independently, within the sovereign cognitive processes of each, a mental act whose occurrence is intrinsically invisible to sense-perception. Yet, that act of cognition was not only efficient action upon the real universe in which that event occurred, but, the application of the validated hypothesis to human practice will alter mankind's relationship to nature, a definite physical effect. The evidence generating the paradox was a matter of effects visible to the senses.

The concluding demonstration, was a matter of effects visible to the senses. However, the connection between the first and the last, however impassioned Archimedes' cry of "Eureka!" might be, is not "visible" to the senses. Therefore, how could the mind of John, one of those who replicated the experience of the discovery by Archimedes, "see" the thought of hypothesizing in the mind of the other student, Robert? Here, in this illustration, we have the germ of Plato's use of the term idea.

To the degree that John and Robert have experienced the act of hypothesizing in this case, they each have an experience which they know to be in correspondence with the relevant experience of the other. To that degree, Robert can "see" the act of hypothesizing within the mind of John, and vice versa. To avoid confusion in terms, let us, for the purpose of this report, call this not "synthetic judgment a priori," but Platonic insight. Both can each see into that moment in the mind of the living Archimedes, in the same way. This cognitive connection among those three figures of this illustration, represents the germ of the truly human quality of social relations, and of the quality which sets the human individual, and species, apart from and above all other living species.

That is, of course, a very simple approximation of what an idea actually represents. Nonetheless, it is a good beginning; we shall improve upon it, step by step.

Plato's Cave

A close collaborator of both Gauss and Riemann, Wilhelm Weber, who was a gifted designer of scientific experimental apparatus, as well as a leading discoverer in the field of electromagnetism, made a very precise measurement, in connection with proving the Ampère angular-force principle, which was, in fact, the first successful modern intervention into sub-atomic microphysics.[33] It was also an idea produced as a part of the overthrow, as also by Ampère's collaboration with Fresnel and Arago, of not only the Newtonian doctrine of propagation of light, but also the general mathematical-physical dogma of the French Bourbon Restoration's "Newton freaks" Coulomb and Poisson.[34]

The advent of atomic, nuclear, and related microphysics, has the categorical experimental implication of showing that, at the very least, certain crucial sorts of sense-perception-observable macrophysical effects, are determined by efficient action located in a domain beyond direct access by human sense-perception.

Thus, Chicago University's Manhattan Project veteran, Professor Moon, speaking in support of the argument I had presented earlier, on the subject of controlled thermonuclear fusion, set before me his affirmative evidence for that same conclusion, that on one afternoon back during the mid-1970s. Moon explained to me (and, repeatedly to others among our collaborators), that the work of Ampère-Weber et al., is evidence in support of ny insistence on the dubiousness of the assumption, that the purely arbitrary presumption, that repulsive "Coulomb forces" are extended simply infinitely, into large and small, is only arbitrary, and not very intelligent, ivory-tower speculation, rather than sound physics. This proof, as set forth by Professor Moon, of the absurdity of such taught dogma as the so-called "Coulomb" principle, exposes the folly of the presumption by some, that a "Coulomb barrier" constitutes a principled barrier to any development of controlled thermonuclear fusion power production for society.[35]

This brings us directly to the crucial topic of "Plato's Cave." Plato's pedagogical allegory was, that what our senses present to us, must be assessed as analogous to the shadows appearing on the irregular surface of the wall of a dimly-lit cave, rather than the objects responsible for that projection of those shadows. Microphysics is an obvious case of such an ontologically paradoxical quality of sense-perception.

However, the rule is, that the basis for Plato's argument is not the absurd argument of the bogomils and also the empiricists such as Locke, Bernard Mandeville, François Quesnay, and Adam Smith, that unseeable little demons, whether called "invisible hands," or "Maxwell's demons,"[36] are the prompters of visible effects. The crucial point is, that each and every discovery of an experimentally validatable universal physical principle, shows that the universe is not controlled by aprioristic kinds of statistical principles; it is controlled, essentially, as Kepler discovered the universal principle of gravitation, by those objects of cognition which we know, as my story's John and Robert did, as the kinds of ideas associated with the human act of making such discoveries. In physical science, such ideas are otherwise known by the name of experimentally validated universal physical principles.[37]

These are ideas in the sense indicated by the way in which Robert is able to look insightfully into the mind of John, in the case of the shared cognitive experience of discovering an experimentally validated universal physical principle.

This connotes, that our sense-perception is not merely something as trivial, and false, as a faithful image of the real universe, but presents us with the mere shadows of physical reality. It is the business of the mind, as the mind is typified by the cognitive action, which generates validated discoveries of universal physical principle, in response to ontological paradoxes. It is the business of the mind, acting in this cognitive way, to discover the reality which corresponds to the effects projected upon our sensorium.

At this point, I summarize the relevant elements of an argument made, with included reference to the work of the founder of the branch of science known as biogeochemistry, Vladimir I. Vernadsky, in earlier published locations.

Vernadsky divided the phenomena experienced in the universe among three categories of what he termed natural objects.[38] The first is the category of natural objects of non-living processes, the second of living processes (the biosphere), and the third of cognitive (noëtic) processes. In each case, the distinct difference of these types of natural objects, within the overlapping action among the classes, is defined empirically by the evidence of the changes which living processes successfully impose upon non-living ones (such as the body of natural objects constituting the biosphere), and the higher order of changes which human cognitive processes impose upon the functions of the biosphere (the noösphere).

Since these differences are measured as the natural effects of those physical principles as causes, they are called by Vernadsky natural objects. Physical science is properly defined as the discovery of the principles expressed in the form of the process of production of such natural objects. The differences in effects of action among such classes of objects, such as the distinction between non-living and living, cognitive and non-cognitive, are measured in terms of the successively higher orders of anti-entropy characteristic of that succession, and are properly defined as of the quality of universal physical principles. This definition, as described by Vernadsky, among others, is based upon the experimental evidence of the corresponding uniqueness of the physical effects associated uniquely with each category of action.[39]

Within each of those three general types of ideas, there are experimentally defined, distinct ideas of valid universal physical principles. My discoveries in the field of the science of physical economy, have the effect of being an insertion into the internal features of the cognitive functions defining the noösphere as man's successful transformation of the biosphere, a biosphere which, in turn, is transforming the non-living processes of our planet by such means as creating oceans and atmosphere.

My own original discoveries in the field of physical economy, were prompted by attention to the role of technological progress in increasing the implied power of mankind to exist in our universe, as this could be measured per capita, and per square kilometer of normalized surface-area of Earth. I recognized this as a reflection of the same principle of anti-entropy[40] which leading biologists had recognized as the characteristic, marginal mathematical distinction of living processes from non-living ones.[41] My discoveries along that line of inquiry, led, in turn, to my subsequent recognition of both the importance of Riemann for interpreting the application of my discoveries, and the importance of Vernadsky's discoveries for situating the result within the universe at large.

The idea of such measurements had been prompted, in large part, by my adolescent studies of the work of Leibniz, in which his notions of physical economy, as he developed those notions over the course of the 1671-1716 interval, radiate from the pores of his work in general. The essential feature of Leibniz's work reflected in my own attack on the problem of physical economy, was Leibniz's notion of a monadology.

There are in the universe, objects such as planetary orbits, as Kepler was the first known to us to define the meaning of a planetary orbit as a cognitively distinct object. It was Leibniz's continuation of the combined work of Kepler, and of Fermat on "quickest-action pathway," which led to both Leibniz's uniquely original discovery of the calculus, and, thence, beyond the calculus as such, to those principles of physical science set forth as his monadology.

The effect of the orbit is always distinct, as Kepler showed the harmonic ordering of relative values among the planetary orbits; the caused effect is always a definitely measurable one, but the cause of that effect can not be simply reduced, on principle, to the same exact (constant) form of simple numbers under all circumstances in general. Put most simply, anything which exists, is interacting with larger processes. It is not only interacting with other processes, but is acting within, and acted upon by a manifold expressing the universal physical geometry within which all of these processes are situated, and by which they are controlled. The role of harmonics for Kepler, in determining the relations among the planetary orbits, expresses this principle.

Therefore, in considering any such subject, we must distinguish between the notion of its existence as an existence, and the relative value that existence expresses within a relevant physical-space-time geometry, such as a Riemannian hypergeometry.

I emphasize, that we must not limit our attention to pairwise interaction among other systems of events; we must recognize the efficient principle of action represented by the physical manifold as such, within which all apparently pairwise interactions occur. In other words, we must adduce the notion of a specific physical space-time (hypergeometrical) "curvature," not only as a physically efficient form of action upon all within it, but as a curvature upon which the individual action is itself acting, as if reciprocally. This is implicit in Kepler's discoveries, but becomes explicit only through the work of such followers of Leibniz as Gauss and Riemann. An object so situated and defined, is what Leibniz signifies by the term monad.

On the condition that we define objects from the standpoint of cognition, rather than naive sense-certainty, we have, as Leibniz emphasized, a vast plenum of such objects, and also categories of objects. For example, there are the relatively simpler objects of non-living processes, also planetary systems, living processes, and the cognitive processes of the individual person. Each belongs to the class of monads, but each belongs to a distinct class, and is distinct within its class. Each has an identity as a non-Aristotelean form of existence, and also a definable, relative notion of the measurable, relative, non-Aristotelean characteristics of the action associated with that existence.

All such monads are associated with the notion of a Platonic idea, ideas akin to the relatively successful mental (cognitive) act of hypothesizing by our John and Robert. It is as such ideas, that the applicable meaning of the term monad is to be defined.

Our knowledge of such ideas is essentially practical in form. The discovery of any valid universal physical principle, typifies the sole means by which a characteristic increase in man's power to exist within the universe is effected. By that, we should understand man's increased (anti-entropic) power to exist, as a species, into an indefinite number of future generations, as improvement of this existence can be measured per capita and per square kilometer of surface area. That consideration is the primary experimental basis for any science of physical economy.

The shaping of the physical-economic policies of a society, to bring about that combined result, for the benefit of both present and, especially, future mankind, is of a quality which I have defined, in earlier locations, as a scientific intention, following Kepler's use of Mind and intention as synonyms for efficient forms of universal physical principles. Physical economy is the science of physical intentions, as these are to be embedded in a nation's laws and related policies, for the increase of mankind's per-capita potential relative population-density into a generation ahead, and beyond.

In the rather common case, the design of a successful experiment which proves the validity of an hypothetical universal physical principle, must contain, by its nature, as if hereditarily, some included feature of design which corresponds to the principle being tested. The application of the results of such a feature of such an experiment, to the designs of products and processes, for example, is a result which we recognize as a technology.

It is the knowledgeable application of science and technology, so defined, to man's action on the universe, per capita and per square kilometer, which is the determining basis for the physically defined productive powers of labor. Thus, the higher the level of educational development of the person, through related cognitive experiences, the relatively higher the relative productive powers of labor of that quality.[42]

That point restated: the combination of the level of development and maintenance of the basic economic infrastructure of the general area and the conditions of the general population, with the levels of knowledge practiced in design and production of useful products, expresses a relationship between the characteristic curvature of that society considered as a Riemannian sort of physical space-time, and the act of production or consumption within that space-time setting. The relative value of a productive act, lies not merely in the internal quality of the intention expressed by that act, but the relative "curvature" of the physical space-time represented by the physical economy in which that act occurs.

Here so far, we have considered only those ideas which are associated with conventional notions of the subject of physical science. This brings us to the third consideration identified above: the social process.

[1] This was written for the included purpose of setting the stage for a coming, Bad Schwalbach, Germany conference of May 4-8, which will have as an included feature some deliberations on urgent contemporary issues of Africa itself,

[2] George Weir was the teetotalling son of a professional Scottish dragoon, the latter equally adept with whisky and saber, who immigrated into the Fall River, Massachusetts area, circa 1861, to join the First Rhode Island cavalry. George Weir's uncle, Captain William Weir, was a Scottish sea-captain, who took the assignment of commanding a U.S.-made steam-ship from Rhode Island, down the Atlantic to Argentina. My paternal grandfather was a clever and energetic fellow of Quebec origin, but unfortunately a bit too soft on Clemenceau for my taste. A pedigree well suited to the requirements of an American Whig of the Clay-Carey-Lincoln tradition.

[3] James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

[4] The bell-wether of that book's shortfalls, is the lack of emphasis on the case of Frederick Douglass, which should have been a central feature of Anderson's treatment of the very subject on which he focusses.

[5] Nicholas of Cusa, 1401-1464, was a key figure of his century, who played a crucial role in establishing the modern sovereign nation-state and also in launching modern experimental physical science.

[6] Francesco Zorzi (1466-1540); Henry VIII (1491-1547, reigned 1509-1547); Pietro Pomponazzi (1462-1525). The significance of the emphasis on "mortalist" here, is of crucial significance for grasping the origins of modern European racism. Although Pomponazzi's fear of the reprisals by religious authorities, and warnings to this effect by his student Gasparo Contarini, prompted him to appear to recant on this matter, his argument for mortalism is implicit in his elaboration of the Aristotelean method. In social practice, all of the leading Venetian currents were practicing mortalists. Slavery was one expression of this.

[7] Paolo Sarpi (1552-1623). [8] Chalker and Cox have been key figures in the fomenting of genocidal conflict within sub-Saharan regions. Montgomery's Cecil Rhodes-echoing, homicidal statements on Africa policy are a matter of record, in his "Memorandum--Tour of Africa Nov/Dec 1947." See Linda de Hoyos, "African Unity: Community of Principle, or New Colonialism," 0EIR, July 30, 1999.

[10] Typical of such dubious interpretations, are the assumption that either sexual-cultural issues are determining, or that "white racism" is a reflection of so-called "Caucasians," and "black racism" a biologically determined cultural distinction of Africans.

[12] Although the first attempts to establish nation-states in Europe are typified by the efforts of Staufer emperor Frederick II, in penisular Italy and Sicily, Alfonso Sabio in Spain, and the work and influence of Dante Alighieri, the first successes came directly out of work of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa and his friends, in the context and aftermath of the great ecumenical Council of Florence. It was the Fall of Constantinople, in 1453, which impelled the circles of Cusa, such as his friends Fernão Martins and the astronomer Paolo Toscanelli, to launch what became known as the rediscovery and colonization of the continent and islands of the Americas. The included purpose of this project, and its included evangelization, was to outflank the combination of enemy forces, represented by Venice and the Ottoman Empire, by building up allies for modern European civilization in lands beyond the oceans. Thus, from the voyages of Columbus, the development of colonies in the Americas became a battleground between the pro-slavery Venetian faction, which took control of Spain's monarchy after the death of Isabella I, and the Christian forces of the Council of Florence. The battle between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces in North America can not be understood competently as an historical phenomenon, except from this standpoint. The development of proto-republics in North America, beginning with the Massachusetts Bay Colony of the Winthrops and Mathers, and the continuation of that legacy under Benjamin Franklin and his circle, must be understood in light of that conflict.

[13] Henry C. Carey, "The Slave Trade Foreign and Domestic," in W. Allen Salisbury, The Civil War and the American System: America's Battle with Britain, 1860-1876 (Washington, D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, 1992). Note, on the map of the Americas, the areas in which the practice of slavery was carried out in great concentration: Brazil, the Caribbean islands, and the southeastern U.S.A. Then compare the vastly higher per-capita net product of agriculture in the northern U.S. states. Islands were ideal locations for controlling large slave populations; areas of relatively warmed climates and relatively dense rainfall were indispensable for operations in which wealth extracted meant chiefly a looting of land and human bodies alike. Hence, the irony of Nixon's "Southern Strategy," which, in thirty-five years, has transformed the formerly richest, most productive region of the U.S. into a "rust belt."

[14] This Habsburg anti-American tradition was defended by the Henry A. Kissinger (e.g., The World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822 [Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1957]), who was trained at Harvard University under the neo-Confederate ideologue Professor William Yandell Elliott of Nashville Agrarian notoriety, as, implicitly, in his shameless London Chatham House address of May 10, 1982.

[15] Theodore Roosevelt was raised as the nephew of the notorious Confederate spy and filibuster Captain James Bulloch. Woodrow Wilson was not only an unregenerate enthusiast for the original Ku Klux Klan, but played a leading role in reviving the Klan, publicly, from the White House, while President. President Grover Cleveland, a Democrat of the same political faction as Republican Theodore Roosevelt, orchestrated the changes in policy which led directly into the establishment of "Jim Crow." President Calvin Coolidge represented that faction in the Republican Party. Presidents Nixon and George Bush, Sr., have been an integral part of the "Southern Strategy" of racism, and the financier interests immediate associated with President George Bush, Jr., are fairly described as pro-racist, Southern-based carpetbaggers who have been looting the former agro-industrial power of the U.S. into a "rust belt" condition since Nixon's 1968 election. On the links to Nietzsche, et al., see Armin Mohler, The Conservative Revolution in Germany (Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland: 1918-1932) (Darmstadt, 1972). .

[17] In the northern states of the union, the superior productivity of labor, per capita and per square kilometer, in agriculture and otherwise, was a reflection of a massive investment in development of the basic economic infrastructure of the locality and region. This included both the infrastructure of production as such, and that, such as schools, essential for promoting the productive potential of the population. In the practice of chattel slavery, the source of the wealth taken by both the planter class and the foreign (British) interest which that class served as compradore, was the looting, by what is called "primitive accumulation," of natural conditions, both the land and the living bodies of the slaves. Thus, the slave-system kept moving on, from looted areas, into new areas for production by slaves. Only where the climate allowed such looting to proceed, at least for a time, was this feasible. Hence, the relative brutishness of intellect and morals typical of the regions of the U.S. in which the tradition of slavery lurks on, to the present day.

[18] To simplify the point, I emphasize both the Gospel of John and the Epistles of Paul, and the role of those portions of the New Testament employed by J.S. Bach for his St. John Passion and St. Matthew Passion. These aspects of the New Testament typify Christianity's integration of the Platonic Classical Greek cultural tradition into Christianity; Bach's referenced works, strictly reproduced in performance, express, most powerfully, the role of what Friedrich Schiller defines as the sublime in Christianity's notions of the Crucifixion.

[19] Public and higher education in the U.S.A. provided the more fortunate pupil a map of some of the crucial topics which should be known. Unfortunately, that map concentrated on the student's learning to recite the map, more often than actually knowing the discoveries to which the points on the map corresponded. If the pupil's entire education provided encounter with a few teachers who provoked the pupil into the kind of experience of knowing typified by the Meno dialogue, the student was thus prompted to apply that lesson to the effect of developing his, or her own self-education. Read the map, but discover the actual territory to which the map pretends to correspond! Then, go on to build a corrected map. The difference is typified, as I stress in my "Gravity of Economic Intentions" (EIR, March 30, 2001), by the difference between the student who has merely learned to recite the Newtonian version of gravitation, and he who has relived Kepler's step by step process of actually making the original discovery of universal gravitation. Knowing, like food, nourishes the body; that which is not food, such as mere learning, will, in its best performance, merely pass the course.

[20] Among increasing numbers of leading circles around much of the world, the relative uniqueness of my successes as an economic forecaster, and in related matters, is no longer honestly debated among competent observers. Since that fact, and its implications are fairly established, it is not necessary to plead a case which has been, thus, already proven. There is a point, beyond which, the assertion of denial becomes either factitious lying, or conduct beyond the bounds of reasonable ignorance.

[21] The most important forms of lying in the three constitutional branches of the U.S. Federal government today, are lies made on the same pretext invoked by the spectactors of the pagan Roman Colosseum: "Go along, to get along."

[22] Dale Carnegie, How To Win Friends and Influence People (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936).

[23] My use of "unscientific," here and elsewhere in this report, signifies arguments upon included arbitrary assumptions, including those of Euclidean geometry, rather than methods appropriate for defining universal physical principles.

[24] LaRouche, op. cit. The thread of development of this principle of method, as applied to this problem by Kepler, is traced explicitly from Plato, through his follower Eratosthenes, and from Nicholas of Cusa, through Leonardo da Vinci, Kepler, Gottfried Leibniz, Abraham Kästner, Carl Gauss, and Bernhard Riemann.

[25] ibid. On Analysis Situs. This issue of method, was the thematic subject of the founding work of modern experimental physical science, Nicholas of Cusa's De Docta Ignorantia. It is the method of Plato, as richly developed, after Cusa, by Luca Pacioli, Leonardo da Vinci, William Gilbert, Kepler, Leibniz, Kästner, Gauss, Riemann, et al.

[26] Robert James Moon (1911-1989) expressed his intention early in life to master thermonuclear fusion. Arriving at the University of Chicago in 1928, he was directed to William Draper Harkins at the Department of Physical Chemistry, with whom he studied and worked, later also obtaining an advanced degree in physics. He taught both subjects at the university. Professor Moon built the first cyclotron at the University of Chicago; solved the problem of the contamination of the carbon moderator, which made the Chicago pile possible under the wartime Manhattan Project; and, conducted pioneering research on the action potential of the nerve after the war, using the world's first scanning X-ray microscope, which he had designed and built.

[28] Meave Leakey and her daughter Louise announced on March 21, that they had discovered a new species of hominid, dubbed Kenyanthropus platyops, which they say lived 3.5 millions years ago. Their claim is based on analysis of a skull found in 1999 in Kenya. What is clearly plausible, is the existence of humans in that part of Africa as early as three to four millions years ago, or even earlier, since the biogeochemical preconditions for human life have pre-existed for not less than approximately two millions years of recurring cycles of glaciation on much of the land-mass of the northern hemisphere. Obviously, the Indian Ocean region and its African coastal region are likely places to find human traces during, for example, the period of massive glaciation of the Eurasian and North American land-mass. However, it is one thing to know that human cultures' existence that early, or earlier, is plausible, and another to assume that a fossil is human, rather than a relic of some higher ape.

[31] On Gauss, Dirichlet, and Riemann. Lazare Carnot and Alexander von Humboldt had been closely associated as members France's Ecole Polytechnique during the first decade of the Nineteenth Century. Humboldt continued an active relationship to the functioning of the Ecole, in Paris itself, until about 1827. During the interval following the Restoration monarchy's pro-British ouster of Monge and Carnot from the Ecole, Humboldt had worked both to maintain the Monge-Carnot legacy, and to build up Germany's science through support of the Monge-Carnot line of development of the Ecole in Germany. Dirichlet, one of Humboldt's leading protégés from the Ecole, moved to Berlin under Humboldt's patronage of both Gauss and Dirichlet. Dirichlet, a sometime teacher of Gauss protégé Riemann, succeeded Gauss in Göttingen, and Riemann then succeeded Dirichlet in that position. Notable features of the interconnections of the collaboration among Gauss, Dirichlet, and Riemann, are Riemann's emphasized reliance on what he termed "Dirichlet's Principle," and Riemann's superseding the work of Dirichlet, in continuing Dirichlet's correction of Euler's attempt to define a prime number series.

[32] Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, reprint of 1927 edition). On this see Kurt Gödel on the fatal flaw in Russell's system: On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematicaand Related Systems and Discussion on Providing a Foundation for Mathematics, Collected Works, Vol. I (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

[35] My own argument had been the much more modest argument, that it was fraudulent to presume that a Newtonian conception, such as that of so-called "Coulomb forces," could be neither arbitrarily extended into the "infinitely small" and "infinitely large," nor assumed to be linear. I had argued, as a matter of our policy, that the matter of "forces at work" on the scale of the nuclear fusion must be left to relevant experimental work. Thus, until Moon's presentation of the crucial implications of the Ampère-Weber principle, our policy had been based on those negative considerations or principle alone; Moon gave us the positive basis needed for the policies respecting controlled nuclear fusion, then formulated on behalf of what, soon after that, became the Fusion Energy Foundation. In 1986, Dr. Moon proposed a model of the atomic nucleus, based on a study of Kepler's work on the solar system, in which the protons occupy the vertex positions of nested shells of four of the five Platonic solids.

[36] The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Professor Norbert Wiener, premised the core of his argument for the founding of the irrationalist cult of so-called "information theory," on citing J. Clerk Maxwell's speculation, that phenomena such as "negative entropy" could be explained by assuming the presence of an invisible little "demon" operating within the cracks of the infinitesimally small. Although this is the same argument made, for theology, by the neo-manichean cult known as the bogomils, and, explicitly, in support of "free trade," by Bernard Mandeville, François Quesnay, and Adam Smith, Wiener's citation of Maxwell reflects Wiener's and John von Neumann's conditioning as one-time acolytes of Bertrand Russell. This doctrine, shared by the latter two, rpovided the basis for the 1970s development of the "Third Wave" cult of Newt Gingrich, Alvin Toffler, Al Gore, et al., and it also supplies the supernatural doctrine of "The New Economy" derived from that "Third Wave" cult.

[37] The formal denial of the existence of universal physical principles, so defined, is traced to the famous series of Critiques of Immanuel Kant. Modern cult-doctrines of "information theory" and "artificial intelligence" are radical derivatives of the argument, against knowable discoveries of universal physical principles, first published by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1966, translation of 1781 edition). That argument is used by neo-Kantians, such as the positivist followers of Ernst Mach, Boltzmann, et al., as the premise for efforts to reduce the mathematical practice of science to linear statistical methods of the so-called "radical empiricists," as the devotees of Wiener and von Neumann do.

[39] This is in opposition to the quietly hysterical reference, implicitly against Vernadsky, to so-called "aperiodic crystals," in the "What Is Life?" essay by Boltzmann follower Erwin Schrödinger. Schrödinger hysterically avoids the fallacy of composition underlying his own argument, that the Clausius-Grassmann-Kelvin notion of entropy is a product not of physical science, but of the hereditary implications of the a priori assumptions of Boltzmann's mathematics.

[40] My use of "anti-entropy" parallels Kästner's use of the term "anti-Euclidean geometry," and Gauss's and Riemann's following Kästner's teaching of this principle. I was, however reluctantly, obliged to abandon the use of "negative entropy," which had had an excellent record in the field of biology earlier, because of the massive propaganda in support of Bertrand Russell acolyte Norbert Wiener's vulgarization of the term "negative entropy."

[41] This is not to argue that the non-living aspects of the universe are characteristically entropic, but only that there exists a characteristic margin of relative anti-entropy, distinguishing living processes from non-living ones of comparable chemical composition. The notion of universal thermodynamical entropy, as associated with the reading of the work of Clausius, Grassmann, and Kelvin, is derived from a dubious imposition of a radically reductionist set of axioms upon the model of the work of Sadi Carnot. The resulting mathematical notion of a universal principle of kinematic entropy is, from its inception, an hereditary implication of the dubious axioms pre-embedded in the mathematics applied to the study. The resulting error is a faithful copy of the common, fatal blunder of ivory-tower mathematics, which Kepler exposed in the cases of Claudius Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Brahe.

[42] This is also relative to the level of development of basic economic infrastructure. Labor of equal skill, situated in a relatively poorer general level of development of basic economic infrastructure, will be of poor quality in its result, even catastrophically so. As I defined the point in earlier locations, basic economic infrastructure is to be seen as a part of the function of the biosphere, as the quality of that biosphere has been enriched with natural products of cognitive activity, such as products of science and technology.

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